We are pleased to announce the third EvAAL Competition. EvAAL aims at bringing together academic and industrial research communities to work together on challenging open problems in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), with the purpose of evaluating different approaches to AAL and envisioning new research opportunities.

During the competitions, we will collect data sets in realistic environments (the living labs), which we hope will be useful as benchmarks to researcher communities for the simulation and test of their solutions.

The competition is composed of three tracks and a final workshop:

Track 1 on Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL, to be held on 1-5 July 2013 at the Living Lab of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ES

Track 2 on Activity Recognition for AAL, to be held on 8-12 July 2013 at the CIAmI Living Lab in Valencia, ES

Track 3 on Companion Robots for AAL, to be held on 15-19 July 2013 at DomoCasa Lab in Pisa, IT

EvAAL workshop to be held in conjunction with the AAL Forum in September 2013, Norrköping, SE (http://www.aalforum.eu/).

Track 1 – Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL

Localization is a key component for achieving context awareness. Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in location-based services and applications. In most cases, however, location information is limited by the accessibility to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which is largely unavailable in indoor environments. The purpose of this track is supporting localization needs of AAL applications.

Track 2 – Activity Recognition for AAL

The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user’s activities is one of the challenging goals of context-aware computing. Real-time monitoring of human movements could be a useful tool for many purposes and future applications such as lifelog, healthcare or entertainment. The purpose of this track is supporting activity recognition needs of AAL applications.

Track 3 – Companion Robots for AAL

The use of robots in domestic environments as companions that assists elderlies in their own home is a growing research field, and the robotics community can already show very good examples of systems able to execute different tasks and complex actions. This track, new to the third year of EvAAL, aims at defining benchmarks for the integration of such robots with intelligent environments that provide user localization and situation detection. The purpose is facilitating human-robot interaction in AAL environments.

Candidate competitors are invited to submit an extended abstract describing their system to the appropriate track. A "competitor" can be any individual or group of individuals working as a single team, associated to a single or a number of organisations. The papers will undergo a peer review by the technical program committee members: they must include a description of the hardware, deployment, and algorithms and protocols used, and the description of the internal data produced and processed by the system.

Extended abstracts, not exceeding 4 pages, must be submitted by the deadline indicated below.

Evaluation criteria for the competition, restrictions on the accepted technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are detailed in the technical annexes of this call, which are published at http://evaal.aaloa.org. Possible refinements of the annexes, also based on participating competitors comments, will be timely distributed to all participants.

Depending on the number of submitted requests for participation, it may be necessary to restrict the number of participants in the competition to the best ranked papers, due to space/logistic constraints at the Living Labs.

A complete version (8-12 pages in LNCS form) of the accepted works will be published in the EvAAL Proceedings. An extended version of the best papers will also be published on the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE), which is SCI indexed.

Competitors are admitted to the competition and their paper is included in the proceeding under the three following conditions:

participate to the competition in July at the living lab hosting the relevant track; the organizers will set individual appointments for each competing team;

present their work at the final EvAAL workshop that will be held inconjunction with the AAL Forum, in September 2013 at Norrköping, SE;

provide organizers with the internal data produced by their systems during the competition and the documentation describing the deployment of their system, as requested by the organizers; the data will be published on the EvAAL website.

As in past editions, the winners of the competition will be announced at a special session of the AAL Forum, a major event in the field of Ambient Assisted Living in Europe (pending approval, to be finalised by April 2013). A prize will be awarded to the highest placed teams.

We encourage submissions from both academia and industry (there are no restrictions to the composition of competing teams) with the aim of seeking innovative solutions for AAL applications. Please check the EvAAL web site at http://evaal.aaloa.org/ for more information and regular updates on the progress of the competition.

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The competitors will be requested to interface their competing artefacts with the measurement tools that will be used in the competition. A shepherding phase is planned during which the EvAAL organizers will help competitors to implement this integration.

Teams interested in monitoring the EvAAL competition and willing to contribute to the discussions on its scientific organization may subscribe to Contest mailing list at http://evaal.aaloa.org/listinfo/contest